Homeland (31 page)

"Holy crap," I breathed, as the copter rose higher, revealing the size of the crowd, which spread from Fell Street to Market Street, spilling out over the side streets, filling them back for blocks and blocks.

"Day-umn," Lemmy agreed. "Want to buzz 'em?"

"Can you do that from here?"

"Yeah," he said. "It'll take the copter out of direct radio range, but we'll still get its feed off the net. And we can check out the software, see if it really works." I watched as he tapped out a flight pattern on his phone, tracing a zigzag over the crowd with his fingertip. Then he pressed "GO." Over our heads, the copter zipped off toward the crowd, keeping its altitude for most of the journey, then gently descending to a mere five yards off the ground.

At this height, I could make out individual faces in the crowd, read the slogans on the signs. Then the flightpath kicked in and the point of view swerved nauseously, tracing that zigzag with mathematical precision, sometimes shuddering as the copter got caught in a gust of wind. We stopped walking and just watched the feed for a while. I shouted "Look out!" at the phone's screen when the copter nearly collided with another UAV, this one covered in markings from MSNBC. Either it had some kind of automatic avoidance routine built into it, or there was a fast-fingered human operator nearby, because it banked hard and barely missed the midair collision.

"Uh, Lemmy, what happens if that thing crashes? I mean, I don't want to turn someone into hamburger."

"Well, yeah, me neither. In theory, any two rotors can give it enough lift to slow its descent, and it makes a lot of noise if it goes in for an emergency landing, which should help people get out of the way."

"Unless it's so noisy that they don't hear it."

"Yeah. Well, that's life in the big city."

I wasn't sure I agreed. Crashing the quadcopter into someone's head would really, really suck. On the other hand, the knowledge that this might happen certainly gave watching the footage an air of extreme danger, which made it that much more compelling. As if it wasn't compelling enough, watching the video of all those faces, thousands and thousands of them, ripping past at speed.

"Let's get down there," he said, and I agreed.

The demonstration was even louder than the one the day before, a roar like a PA stack that I could hear from two blocks away, over the honking horns of the cars trying to find their way around it. The sidewalk was too jammed with people to walk, so we joined the hundreds who were threading their way through the stuck cars, dodging the bikes and motorcycles that were doing the same. Soon we could barely move, and I realized we were now
in
the demonstration, even though there were stuck cars all around us. I looked in one, saw a harried-looking woman with two little kids in the back seat who were losing their minds, one hitting the other with a toy car, both of them screaming like banshees, silent gaping mouths through the closed windows.

I locked eyes with the driver, who was looking resigned and frazzled. I wondered about all the other people who were stuck around me, wanting to get home and feed the kids or get to work and not get docked for being late or wanting to get to the hospital or the airport. I entertained a brief fantasy of directing traffic, helping all those people get unstuck and turn around and head away from the protest, get moving again, but there was no way I could do that. (Later, I read reports of other people doing just that, and of the crowds making way to help this happen, and I felt both proud of my fellow human beings and ashamed of not having the guts to try it myself at the time.)

Now we couldn't move without a lot of "excuse me"s shouted into the ears of people who were shouting the same thing into the ears of the people ahead of them.

"This is insane," I said.

"Pretty amazing," Lemmy said, and smiled hugely.

Suddenly, it felt like the world was flipping upside-down. It
was
amazing. Hundreds of thousands -- millions? -- of my neighbors and friends had taken over the city of San Francisco because they were pissed off about the same things I was pissed off about. They'd come and put their lives and liberty on the line because, well, because stuff was
messed up
. It wasn't just the darknet docs, it wasn't just the lobbying to make the deal over student loans even worse, it wasn't just the foreclosed houses and all the jobs that had vanished. It wasn't just the planetary devastation and global warming, it wasn't just the foreign dictators we'd propped up or the private prison industry we supported at home. It was
all of it
. It was the fact that there was all this
terrible stuff
and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it. Not our political leaders. Not our police. Not our army. Not our businesses. In fact, a lot of the time, it seemed like politicians, police, soldiers, and businesses were the ones
doing
the stuff we wanted to put a stop to, and they said things like, "We don't like it either, but it has to be done, right?"

Here was a big slice of my city that had turned out to say
WRONG
. To say
STOP
. To say
ENOUGH
. I knew that these were all complicated problems that I couldn't grasp in their entirety, but I also knew that "It's complicated" was often an excuse, not an explanation. It was a way of copping out, saying that nothing further could be done, shrug, let's get back to business as usual.

I'd never seen this many people in one place. From the copters' point of view, it was like the city had come to life, the streets turning from lifeless stone and concrete into a living carpet of humanity that stretched on and on and on. It was scary, and I had no idea how it would turn out, but I didn't care. This was what I'd been waiting for, this was the thing that
had to happen
. No more business as usual. No more shrugging and saying "What can you do?" From now on, we'd do
something
. Not "Run in circles, scream and shout," but "March together, demand a change."

I also realized that my stupid idea for what to do next for Joe's campaign wasn't so stupid after all.

Lemmy's copters just kept buzzing the crowd, and our Ustream channel kept picking up viewers, up to a couple thousand now. No doubt a lot of them were in that crowd, but plenty were from all over the world, to judge by the realtime stats.

Every so often, we'd deploy the three copters with the software-defined radio scanners to check for high concentrations of police-band chatter. The police had recently started to encrypt their signals, but that didn't matter: we didn't care
what
they were saying, we only wanted to detect places where a lot of police communications were taking place. In other words, we were interested in the fact that they were talking, not what they were talking about.

When the three detected police-band spikes, they sent the fourth copter to home in on it and take some video. That way, we caught a lot of footage of arriving convoys of militarized cops and then the National Guard. Hundreds of them, and dozens of police buses -- the kind they took masses of prisoners away in -- and even little clusters of police quadcopters that were sending their signals back and forth in the same encrypted band.

Two of these copters latched on to our scout and started to follow it around.

"Uh-oh," Lemmy said.

"Why uh-oh?"

"Well, even with these new power-cells, that little guy's going to run out of battery soon enough and I'm going to have to bring him in for a fresh power-pack, and they're going to know exactly who we are and where we are."

"Uh-oh," I agreed. "Is flying a UAV illegal?"

He shrugged. "Probably. I mean, no, not in general, but is there some kind of freaky, 'conspiracy to abet civil disorder' BS charge they could whomp up against anyone they don't like? I'm pretty sure there is."

"Uh-oh," I said again.

"I guess I'll just ditch it," he said. "Man, this sucks."

"How much time is on the power pack?"

He looked at the telemetry streaming off the scout. "Maybe twenty minutes."

"Can you tell it to land somewhere out of the way, maybe a rooftop, and we can try to collect it later?"

"Yeah," he said. "Good one."

I used Google Earth to scout out the nearby roofs and found a likely looking spot, which I showed to Lemmy, and he took over steering the scout to it -- it was away from the main body of the protest, and who knows what the SFPD crew who were piloting our tails thought we were up to? I got to steer the remaining three, staying away from the police copters. Mostly, I just tried to zoom in on any place where things looked interesting. I found one spot, right by civic center, where a bunch of parents with small children had made a kind of kindergarten, an open circle of people with a bunch of playing kids in the middle. Boy, was that cool -- made me think that my fellow humans were really basically great.

I got a call from Ange, who, of course, was already in the thick of the crowd, blocks away from me within the mass. I told her where I was and she told me to stay put and she'd come and meet me.

"Okay, we're down," Lemmy said. "You bookmarked that location, right?"

"Got it," I said.

"Roger that, mission control," he said.

"Yeah, that." I flicked from one copter feed to the next, watching as a cam soared over our heads and I saw that we weren't on the edge of the protest anymore -- it now stretched for two blocks behind us, and there were lots of people still arriving.

I was still taking in this fact when a large, firm hand clamped my shoulder and I had a momentary panic, sure that this was someone from Zyz come to snatch me out of the crowd. Before I was even conscious of what I was doing, I had started to move into the thick of the crowd, turning sideways to eel my way through the small gaps between bodies. But then a familiar voice said, "Marcus!" and I stopped and turned around. It was Joe Noss, in his usual campaigning clothes, sweater and all. He was grinning like a bandit.

"Joe!" I said. "Sorry, you startled me!"

"Ah, I know no one wants to run into the boss on the weekend," he said. "Isn't this something, then?"

"It's amazing," I said, thinking as I said it that maybe he wasn't someone who supported this kind of thing and wondering if I'd said the wrong thing. "I mean, I think it's incredible, right?"

"Marcus, in all my life I've never seen anything like this. If there was ever a time to be an independent candidate, it's now. These people are just plain
fed up
with the way things work in government. And so am I; so there we are, all in this together."

"Preach, brother!" Lemmy said, and Joe smiled his thousand-watt smile at him.

"Hello there," he said. "I'm Joseph Noss."

"Oh, I know it! I'm Lemmy."

"Lemmy's a friend of mine. From the hackerspace."

Joe shook his hand. "What a treat. Marcus has told me about your space. It sounds, well, extraordinary. Like you're some kind of superheroes of science. From what he tells me, you folks can build just about anything you set your mind to."

Lemmy nodded vigorously. "Yeah, pretty much. And if we can't build it, someone at some other makerspace or hackerspace will help us out. We have a Friday night drop-in -- you should come by and see what we're up to."

"I'd love that, though perhaps I might have to wait until after election day, as I'm a little preoccupied." He scanned the crowd again. "I can't get over this," he said. "All these people."

"Look at this," Lemmy said, and showed him his screen.

"Is that from one of the news networks?" Joe asked.

Lemmy laughed. "Yeah, HNN, Hackerspace News Network. It's coming off some unmanned quadcopters I built. Up there." He pointed at the sky. Joe looked up, looked back at him.

"You're joking. You're flying
helicopters
by remote control?"

"Oh, they only weigh a couple pounds and they're the size of dinner plates. Little guys, nothing fancy. Maybe fifty bucks' worth of parts in each of them. Most expensive thing in them are the batteries, and I hand-built them from salvaged cell phone battery packs."

Joe put his hands on his hips and cocked his head at Lemmy, as if wondering whether he was pulling his leg. Then he shook his head in admiration. "Incredible," he said. "Just amazing."

"Want to fly one?" Lemmy said, tapping at his screen. "There's about fifteen thousand people watching the feed off this one, go nuts. Just use the keypad."

Joe looked at the phone in his hand as if it were radioactive. "I don't think I'm qualified to operate an aircraft."

"Oh, you're not
operating
it. It operates itself. You just tell it where to go."

I thought Joe was going to balk, but he prodded tentatively at the screen, then more forcefully. "Amazing," he said, after a little time. "Just...
amazing
. What's this red icon flashing for, though?"

Lemmy took the phone. "Low battery," he said. "Better bring the gang in for a battery swap. Luckily I brought a ton of charged spares."

He disappeared down the rabbit hole, all his attention focused on his phone, doing that classic nerd-focus thing, radiating a cone of "I'm busy, don't bug me" as his fingers danced.

There was something I wanted to tell Joe, but I was scared to. My mouth had dried up, but my palms were wet. The crowd noise around us was loud, but I could still hear my heart in my ears.

"Joe," I said. He looked at me with those eyes that seemed to bore straight into my soul.